The company told subsidiaries Bend and Bluepoint it will work with them to determine their next steps and minimize job losses
Both were live service; one at Bend, one at Bluepoint. Bluepoint was helping work on God of War: Ragnarok until 2022, at which point they were developing this now-cancelled God of War live service game.
Finally the live service bubble is popping.
I hope the developers working on these projects get put on to something else, instead of shown the door as is so often the case.
Sony specifically had to learn many harsh lessons recently.
The Bungie acquisition brought them nothing but issues. Concord being shutdown immediately after launch was a huge was of money too. Other titles under the Sony umbrella are either struggling, or gaining poor reputation due to their completely numbskull decision to enforce PSN account usage, even for single player offline games.
There could have been games where there was just a brilliant idea for a game that keeps having engaging content on an ongoing basis with passionate devs.
But live service so an exec could check a box for their quarterly shareholder call was always going to be DOA.
The game they killed 3 days after release might have been good but i haven't seen a single gameplay video or have any idea of what the game was about. Are they that scared of releasing a shit game and keeping it playable but dead for a while?
Keeping engaging content on an ongoing basis seems to be such an unreachable target for most devs and game designs that it's undoing large swaths of the industry.
Yeah live service anything was going to land like a dead fish in my area where whether or not you can get a ping through to fucking Google depends on how many people in the neighborhood are off work.